Will sound like code if your not Mormon.

First off, I recently said I don't always like my calling. True I do not always love it, just like not everything of motherhood is fantastic. (You can click on my potty training adventures to pick up my least favorite part of motherhood. I normally like my calling, I have been doing it for almost two years, in two different wards, under three different primary presidencies. It is a very humbling calling for me, I feel ill prepared. I don't feel like me and 8-11 year old girls are on the same plain. I never participated in Activity Days, because I am too old, but I wanted to believe in the organization, so I pretty much read everything I could find on lds.org about it. I totally believe! The world is becoming more wicked, and children need more support than they did previously. They are faced with so much more and a younger age than ever before, so they need a chance to get together outside of Sunday to have good wholesome fun. I got to the point I really enjoyed my calling and I was sad I was leaving those girls. Then they called me back to Activity Days in my new ward. I laugh at the bishopric member when he asked me, I thought it was some sort of joke. It has been a completely different experience, I started off with two girls in this ward now I have three. I wish there was another 10 girls in this ward like my last for them all to interact with. I rarely have two successful activities in a row because when you only start off with two its easy to have no one show. My new, third girl just joined the church, her mom is not a member. Neither my co-leader or I have been able to figure out how to incorporate this girl yet. Saturday royally sucked, the girl wanted to come to a Stake Activity Days, but her mom didn't let her. I felt terrible about it all day, things should have happened different but yet they didn't. I stew and stress when things go bad. Unfortunately, I wasn't the best mom, from a crappy morning, I snapped at my son for having too many accidents. After literally making myself sick over the whole business, I realized I can't change anything that already happened, and I need to use the atonement in my life, and turn it over to the Lord. I do the best I can, ask for help (a lengthy email to the primary presidency) and move on, with hope and faith in the Atoning Sacrifice of the Lord. Part of me is so overwhelmed with lack of successful activities I want to be released, and part of me wants to have a successful summer, and when I leave the ward in August leave my calling feeling like I made a difference. Not for my own pride, but hoping it helped the girls. As it is, I keep remembering my four successful activities in this ward, and remembering what one of the girl's mom and older sister (who incidentally is my age) told me about the girl loving activity days. Hmm, you think the Prophet ever has days like this?
Overall, it made me very appreciative to my uncle when he said motherhood is very becoming to me, and I look happier each time he sees me. (Or something to that effect.) Some days, you just really need a complement the day after.

Daddy Daughter

My daughter already knows computers are very exciting.  

An Adams

This darling little girl of mine thinks she is an Adams. Adams is my paternal grandma, my daughter's great grandma. They naturally wake up super early. Many mornings, my daughter wakes up anywhere from 5:30-6:30. I told her yesterday if she was going to keep this up, we were going to ship her off to live with my dad or my grandma, someone who wakes up early. After my sister finishes her dissertation, I figured she might work too. I do not enjoy waking up early, mothering this child is the first time I've woken up this early since early morning seminary.

She obviously took this little conversation to heart. She woke up at 4:30 to eat and stayed asleep until 8. 8 is much more doable, but my favorite is 9. Sadly enough even when I wake up at 6 to take care of her, I'm only annoyed for a minute. She starts eating, and the hormones start rushing through my blood, and I can't help but love every minute she is awake.

Self Portait

I found this on my camera, I guess my three year old needed a composition of self portraits, I put them together in the collage format for him. That's what mom's are for.

Goblin Valley at its finest

While on vacation I took a set of pictures with the intention of making a panoramic image of Goblin Valley. Canon creates some pretty good software for this purpose if you happen to have it...However I was booted into Ubuntu and didn't want to try and get the commercial software that came with my camera to work through Wine, so I decided to see what the free software world could do for me. It took about 2 min to find Hugin and have it installed and importing images. Not knowing what I was doing it took me about 5-10 min of mindless clicking around in the software before it somehow output this image:


Makes you wonder why more people don't make the plunge to Linux. It also makes you wonder why you go to work all day instead of playing capture the flag down among the "apple" rocks as some goofy little kid directly related to me would call them.

Tulips

Two weeks ago

After multiple pictures of my son, he wanted to take a pictures of me.

I'll be honest

I'll be honest sometimes I despise my calling. I find it the most difficult age (8-11) in the church to work with. After working with the age for two years I still absolutely nothing about it. They are too young to do anything without their parents help, but not old enough for their parents to care. Not to mention for the past two years, I've always felt like my organization for the girls is like an island apart from the rest of the ward. I also do not like stake activities, no matter what age they are written for. Three hours?! for eight year olds?!
As I was complaining about all this in further detail to my husband, he said then ask to be released. I said you know I won't do that. With all this sad, I still don't quite understand how people can tell a bishop no. Or how someone doesn't feel guilty if they don't give their calling their all.